Getting to the Emptiness by Going to One and Back to the Many
March 2026
We're struck by an observation from a book I read by Waldron, who described our senses as the "news of difference*." Our perception is built to notice change –the flicker, the shift, the new. When something stays the same, the mind stops registering it entirely. Now, in Buddhist practice, we are harnessing our mind to one object of focus: mindfulness of breath, mindfulness of a meditation topic. It's a repetitive process. And here is where it can feel, frankly, dreary. The mind, scanning for novelty, finds none. The breath comes, the breath goes. The same instructions, the same posture, the same return when attention wanders. For a consciousness trained on endless stimulation, this poverty of input can feel unbearable.
Our minds, conditioned to so much stimulus, grow uncomfortable in the presence of sameness. There's a subtle panic beneath the boredom, a reaching for something, anything, to confirm we are still here, still alive. The repetition feels like a kind of fading. When the mind perceives the same thing again and again, it begins to treat it as no thing at all. And this is precisely the edge where practice becomes interesting.
This is where we can lightly practice engaging, not in nothing coming up, not in a dull or collapsed way, but in a manner that is engaged and alive. The emptiness we encounter through sustained attention is not a vacancy. It is a clearing. When we stop demanding novelty from each moment, we discover that presence itself has a texture, a warmth, a quiet vibrancy that our busyness had been obscuring all along.
And yet, even in silence, even in the apparent solitude of turning inward, we are not alone. We have seen it again and again on retreat, a space full of people doing the same simple thing together, and something begins to gather between us. A shared settling. A richness from our own existence begins to disclose itself. An anonymous participant who wrote about the retreat beautifully** that the retreat's fixed, repetitive schedule as "a scaffolding of practice" and within that scaffolding, something unexpected: "... every movement becomes sacred. The ordinary gestures of walking to the hall, of sitting down, of lifting a cup, these shed their dullness and begin to shine. In the simplicity, in the sameness, in going to one, we find our way back to the many, and to the quiet holiness of being.
*Footnote: William Waldron, The Buddhist Unconscious: "Cognitive awareness, in other words, necessarily arises as a function of discernment (prati-vijñapti). As Bateson observes: 'perception operates only upon difference, all receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference'"
** Footnote: Seriously, check out the poem. It's amazing.
We're struck by an observation from a book I read by Waldron, who described our senses as the "news of difference*." Our perception is built to notice change –the flicker, the shift, the new. When something stays the same, the mind stops registering it entirely. Now, in Buddhist practice, we are harnessing our mind to one object of focus: mindfulness of breath, mindfulness of a meditation topic. It's a repetitive process. And here is where it can feel, frankly, dreary. The mind, scanning for novelty, finds none. The breath comes, the breath goes. The same instructions, the same posture, the same return when attention wanders. For a consciousness trained on endless stimulation, this poverty of input can feel unbearable.
Our minds, conditioned to so much stimulus, grow uncomfortable in the presence of sameness. There's a subtle panic beneath the boredom, a reaching for something, anything, to confirm we are still here, still alive. The repetition feels like a kind of fading. When the mind perceives the same thing again and again, it begins to treat it as no thing at all. And this is precisely the edge where practice becomes interesting.
This is where we can lightly practice engaging, not in nothing coming up, not in a dull or collapsed way, but in a manner that is engaged and alive. The emptiness we encounter through sustained attention is not a vacancy. It is a clearing. When we stop demanding novelty from each moment, we discover that presence itself has a texture, a warmth, a quiet vibrancy that our busyness had been obscuring all along.
And yet, even in silence, even in the apparent solitude of turning inward, we are not alone. We have seen it again and again on retreat, a space full of people doing the same simple thing together, and something begins to gather between us. A shared settling. A richness from our own existence begins to disclose itself. An anonymous participant who wrote about the retreat beautifully** that the retreat's fixed, repetitive schedule as "a scaffolding of practice" and within that scaffolding, something unexpected: "... every movement becomes sacred. The ordinary gestures of walking to the hall, of sitting down, of lifting a cup, these shed their dullness and begin to shine. In the simplicity, in the sameness, in going to one, we find our way back to the many, and to the quiet holiness of being.
*Footnote: William Waldron, The Buddhist Unconscious: "Cognitive awareness, in other words, necessarily arises as a function of discernment (prati-vijñapti). As Bateson observes: 'perception operates only upon difference, all receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference'"
** Footnote: Seriously, check out the poem. It's amazing.
